Product Strategist: Product Management as a Product 01

Product managment has been around for a while. It was something more than project management and product management. It was focused beyond the technical, while still being focused on getting the whole thing, not just the technical creation, to the launch. It had its vector of differentiation.

For technical B2B companies product management was akin to brand management. There were things that someone had to take care of beyond the technology. Brand management was not useful in the nascent markets, or even in the tornado. Brand issues were left not in a line or strategic organization, but in marketing and marketing communications. Sales left the technical to the sales engineers. Strategy was the responsibility of the executives. An integrated view of development, marketing, and sales existed only on the desk of the CEO, and that CEO was focused on selling the investors and making payroll. The integration had the CEO focusing on things that typically are managed through the framework of economic indifference. So the CEO needed someone to to whom they could hand off the details of this integration.

In the early days, this someone, the product manager, had an MBA and could talk the CEO talk. The product manager's background would reflect that of the dominant corporate culture. They might be a developer, a marketer, or a sales rep.

These days they might not have an MBA. They might be a developer or a marketer. They might answer to development, marketing, or sales. Most hires will have been in positions where they had significant customer contact. They may have been in technical support. Customer contact is the big deal, as is the voice of the customer, a role and set of responsibilities that product managers perform.

The product managers job may also be split between project managers handling the product and the underlying technologies, a product marketing manager handling the messaging and branding, and, although I've not seen any positions defining a specific job title for a sales intermediary, sales. Or, they may handle the all of these areas and more. A product manager in an Agile-based organization might have someone else in the role of product owner.

Regardless of whether you have an MBA or not, you will have to talk the MBA talk, the financials. Regardless of where you come from or in what department you sit, you will have to respect all the functional experts that are contributing to your product, to your success, and to the success of your company.

You have to sell yourself to all of these staffers, functional unit managers, business unit managers, executives, participants, stakeholders, clients, customers, or market segments. They have specific functional needs of their interface, of you, their interface. They have, in Christensen's words, jobs to be done. You as an interface are probably more complex than the interface of the application you sell. They depend on you, and you depend on them. The success of the symbiosis is yours, all yours. And, they are not interested in taking a training class in how to use you. Nor, do they provide a training class on how to use them. Fair enough.

Regardless of who they are and where they sit in the corporation, they have goals. The align their goals with those of the company. At the heads down end of the productivity chain, they are tactical and dealing with the right now. Still, they need some vision as to what is coming. The short iterations of Agile reduces the need for that, but if you want to shorten up some inherently linear procuesses, they need to see what is coming. The further away you get from the heads down, now, folks, the deeper into the future they want to see, the more strategic they want to be.

In the military, time orientation is not tactical vs. strategic, but reactive vs. proactive with predictive being between those two extremes. Predictive is where you begin to gain proactivity. In a reactive situation, you do what needs to be done, and you do it now. On the battlefield, hopefully, everyone is trained, so there is no lag between the need and the doing, between seeing where to apply fire and applying it. In fact, when properly trained, strategically trained, they don't need to see the fire, they just apply it, some bullets get wasted, some are effective, but no people get wasted. On the battlefield, there comes that point where the people shooting at you have to reload, or retreat, or just slow down their continual creation of new problems--everything is solved for now in the immediate terms of reactiveness, so the situation becomes predictive. You can see that when they come, they will come through there, so you direct someone on your team to take care of it. You see something else. You are influencing the future, you are being proactive, you are being strategic even if it isn't very deep into the future. You have a forecast. The more slack you get, the more proactive you can be. The reactive is delegated to someone trained to take it on. With the reactive delegated, you can think deeper into the future, and cope with lags. Everybody needs to start digging in, because we are staying the night. Start putting up the perimeter. You are not as strategic as your commander, but within scope of the situation, you are it, you are the commander.

In a startup, you get hired after version 1.0 or more has gone out the door. You come in only after there is a customer base to listen to, only after a backlog has piled up, only after some project management and development methodologies have been in place, only after development, marketing, and sales have been doing their thing for a while. You get put into a situation. "It's going out the door at the end of the month." And, that is your reactive situation. You don't know your people. You don't know your bosses. You don't know what they know about where the messes are. You don't know the rules. You don't know the controls. You don't know how the organization shapes its decisions. But, here are reins, make it happen. Thus continues the battle. You just rolled of the helicopter that never even landed.

You won't sleep well for a while. You might not sleep at all, because the bug list carried you to your telcom with the programmers in another country on the day lit side of the planet, and still you've got to look fresh, be sharp, make decisions, and where possible, influence the future. You must get to the proactive as quick as possible. You have to be able to answer a question and make it stick without saying, "I've got to check with the CEO," which means you've got to have the CEO sold, hopefully on the day of the interview. A few weeks into the job will be too late.

You got that one out the door. Everyone respects you and trusts you. And, you respect everyone else involved even after some disputes. The revenue numbers are looking good. And, you survived the launch party, if your company still holds those. You have yet to be answered questions like what is the reliability of the estimates you are given, and others. You have some answers like Joe showed rock solid commitment to getting his stuff done. And, you have a list of things that need to change. Some of those will change quickly with little effort, some slowly, some only by pulling theeth. Ah, the job.

You've gotten more than a few releases launches. You've gained proactivity. You are sleeping through the night. New concepts and ideas arrive from the top and from the bottom of the company. These new concepts force you to think about their impacts. "Web 3.0, what the heck?" You need to stay far enough ahead to be influential. You need to be strategic. You need to stay aligned through all the changes coming at you.

So what about product management? Where will it take you? How will it change? How will you keep it from becoming a commodity? The PMP is making it impossible for people who managed projects their entire professional careers without the appropriate job titles to find work. It is driving down wages as well. As product management has become more prevelent, those wages are being driven down. Professionals become commodities. They enter late market. So its time to look for new vectors of differentiation. It's time to find a path to something that the CEO will pay more money for, and find more essential.

Who is taking care of the tempo or mix between sustaining and disruptive technologies? The CEO? Some other executive? The product strategist? The product manager leading the product management unit? The technologists?

Who throughly understands that corporate strategy and product strategy must be and remain aligned throughout the life of the company, the underlying technology, and the products? Are they doing it, or just making noise like they are doing it?

Or you can ask "where's the pain?" Where is product management not as successful as it should be, or where is not successful at all? How is it that you are successful product manager, but the company isn't all that successful? Where are the impedences?

Just keeping your head down and doing the job will keep you in the job. Doing a great job will get you the CEO seat. But, particularly in technical fields, doing the same thing over and over works only as long as the career is seen as valuable by the market. Otherwise, a career turns into a series of jobs, and those jobs pay less than they paid the last time regardless of competence or excelence. This is why at the end of the day, you have to ask the question, where could my field go, and how do I get there first. You are a product. Your chosen career is a product. You are the product manager of your career even beyond price-based competition, and commoditization, or even disruptive innovation, or that product manager in a box that is lurking out there in Tom Peter's whitecollar layoff world.

Let me know where you think product management as a career is going? Leave a comment. Thanks.